West saw upgrades in four key areas: Information management in Microsoft Office 2010,
Outlook's new compatibility with IT systems, project management
compatibilities, and the elimination of code from collaboration
management. The general theme of the upgrades is in line with the big
collaboration trend: Microsoft Office 2010 helps workers collaborate
without having to bring the IT shop into the mix to create code or
otherwise facilitate that collaboration.
"What we're seeing is a lot more power to the end user," says West.
"Microsoft Office 2010 is interacting with itself better without
changing the user-facing functionality too much." By allowing Microsoft
Office 2010 to tap into back-end data, Microsoft has made the entire ms
office suite a tighter-knit package, and SharePoint is becoming ms
office's central hub.
West notes that the Save As window, for example, is so seamlessly linked
to SharePoint that people can be centralizing their docs and saving it
to SharePoint without even realizing it. Whereas before you had to
upload it to a SharePoint site via FTP, the Save As function now makes
this happens seamlessly.
Also, users can now add metadata to Microsoft Office 2010 documents from
inside the doc, and that metadata will populate in SharePoint. "The
metadata aspect is huge," says West. "When you create ms office docs,
you'll see a new band that asks you to tell it what project the document
is for,what type of document, that sort of thing. Before that person
can save the doc, they have to fill out that info, forcing users to
maintain good document management practices."
